Sublime

Her colleagues use her office as a lunchroom, during lunches when she isn’t eating thousand-year eggs. Today her menu is chicken sandwich, so the place is safe for all ethnicities.

leery,

Beneath these giants, way down in the understory, her own body seems freakishly small, like one of those acorn-people she made in childhood.

He has always been alien to her, a man of procedures where there should be passions.

Wolfe now moved into a new apartment at 865 First Avenue, just two blocks toward the East River from the Perkinses’ house.

They understand what most people in this land don’t: that you can’t restore what you ain’t never had. Living on a land that ain’t yours, pretending to know everything when you don’t, making up rules for this or that to make yourself seem big, that puts a terrible strain on a body. This land don’t belong to the people that rules it, see. And it’s

territory was being encroached upon. “Even eye color?” Rich’s eyes widened. “Boring,” Levi said. “Eye color, hair color, height, gender—those

She sighs long and slides down into the way things need to be. “It’s good to be cooked for.”